Zoo(34)

"This stuff is all well and good when we're talking about pollution," said Saltonstall. "But I thought we were talking about pheromones. What does pollution have to do with pheromones?"

I rapped my knuckles on the table.

"Hydrocarbons," I said. "That's where pheromones and pollution connect. Pheromones are made up of hydrocarbons. So is petroleum."

Around the table, everyone sat up a little straighter. My mind was racing. I couldn't help it-I sprang to my feet and started pacing behind my chair.

"Hydrocarbons are everywhere," I continued. "Over the last two hundred years, from car traffic and industrial activity, there's been a massive increase in volatile hydrocarbons in the atmosphere. Methane, ethylene … "

"Not to mention the prevalence of petroleum," Chloe said. "Petroleum is in everything-plastic, house paint, balloons, pillows, shampoo. It leaches into the groundwater."

"Didn't studies in the nineties explore the health hazards of plastics due to their chemical similarity to estrogens?" Dr. Terry Atkinson added. He was a chemical engineer from Cooper union   .

I felt like diving across the table and giving him a high five. I didn't.

"Yes!" I said. "If hydrocarbons can mimic estrogen, it's entirely conceivable that they can mimic pheromones."</ol>
 
 

 

"Or take the plastic compound used in water bottles," said Dr. Quinn, jabbing a pen in the air. "They found that it caused the estrogen levels of fish to skyrocket for some reason. In a lake outside a manufacturing plant in Germany, researchers found that there were no male fish present at all."

"We are flying down the wrong path here, folks," Saltonstall insisted. He cleared his throat and swiped back his silver shock of hair with his hand. "How do chemical hydrocarbons change without some sort of catalyst? Plastic has been around for over fifty years. If it affected the way animals process pheromones, wouldn't we have noticed long before now?"

I let out a breath and tried to come up with an answer. Saltonstall again had raised a good counterargument.

"Excuse me, Mr. Oz," said Betty Orlean, an environmental scientist from the University of Chicago. "Quick question. When did you start noticing this increase in animal aggression?"

"As far as my data show, around 1996," I said. "But it didn't start getting bad until the aughts."

"Nineteen ninety-six is right around when cell phones started becoming more popular," Betty said a bit cryptically. "And cell phone use has exponentially increased since then." The thought was half formed in her head.

"So?" Saltonstall said.

"Well, Dr. Saltonstall," she said, "we know that cell phones use radiofrequency energy, which forms fields of electromagnetic radiation. Some animal functions at the cellular level can be affected by such fields. The fear for years has been that one field could disrupt the other. That's why there have been so many studies about the link between cell phone use and brain cancer. For years, our world has been swimming in an unprecedented sea of radiation."

"Yes," I said, really going now. "Perhaps cell phone radiation is somehow cooking the ambient environmental hydrocarbons in a way we've never seen before-morphing them into a chemical that animals are picking up as a pheromone. And it's changing their cerebral physiology, as we've seen at Columbia. We know that the affected animals have bigger amygdalae."

"Oz, I believe I remember something." Dr. Quinn jumped in. "It was a study about bees in the Netherlands." She spoke slowly and distractedly as she poked at the laptop open in front of her. "Yes, here it is. I'll put it on the SMART board."

A moment later, a graph-peppered scientific paper appeared on the screen.

"This was a study done in the Netherlands in the nineties," she said. "It shows the effects of radiation on bees whose nest was relocated beside a cell phone tower. As you can see in table one, when the bees were in the forest, they had no trouble foraging and returning to the nest."

She got up, walked forward, and pointed at the curving lines of a graph on the screen.

"But here in the second graph, it shows that when the nest was placed next to the cell phone tower, the bees took longer and longer to get back, until the hive eventually died off."

"I, for one, am intrigued by Mr. Oz's theory," Dr. Orlean said. "I think we may have our culprits-pollution from hydrocarbons and electromagnetic radiation from cell phones have coupled together, resulting in critical biosphere meltdown."

There were nods all around. Harvey Saltonstall was visibly irritated. You could see the steam escaping from his ears.

"But that still doesn't explain why these alleged hydrocarbon-morphed pheromones don't affect human beings. Can you explain that, Mr. Oz?"

He gave the "Mr." a very slight emphasis to remind everyone that I didn't have a PhD.

I bit my lip again. But only to create my own dramatic pause. I did have an answer.

"Human beings lack the vomeronasal organ," I said to Saltonstall. "The tissue at the base of the nasal cavity that causes response to airborne pheromones. Almost all mammals have it, but not humans. In fact, there are theories that the human VNO may have diminished as our relationship with dogs evolved. As it got bigger in dogs, it went away in humans. Many of the genes essential for the VNO are completely nonfunctional in humans."

I looked around the room and realized I had won it.

Saltonstall sat there looking as though I'd yanked his pants down, so I assumed he knew what I was talking about. Dr. Orlean smiled at me.

"Bravo, Mr. Oz," she said. "I don't think anyone can deny that this is a breakthrough. I think we've finally hit the jackpot. For the first time I feel like we have a good chance of understanding what's causing HAC."
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"Yes, but unfortunately that only leads us to the next question," I said. "How do we stop it?"





Chapter 70



A BATTERED POLICE van emits a feeble, oscillating shriek as it weaves through the clogged, dust-choked streets of East Delhi, India.

Behind the van's wheel, newly appointed sub-inspector Pardeep Sekhar nearly clips a fruit vendor as he wipes sweat off his face with the sleeve of his khaki shirt. The fruit vendor erupts into a torrent of curses, and Pardeep answers him with a dismissive wave.

"Clean the dirt out of your ears, bumpkin," he halfheartedly grumbles out the window. "That sound from my van-that's not a demon but a siren. It means, out of the way. Police coming through!"

Pardeep blames the television and Internet for the last decade's influx of rural migrants into the city. All those channels luring illiterate fools into the bright lights and Bollywood lifestyle they will never achieve. When they can't find work, they turn to petty crime-pickpocketing, purse snatching. That's where he comes in.

At the next traffic-glutted intersection, he laughs to himself as he watches a guy trying to maneuver his cherry-red Lamborghini around a donkey cart. An Italian luxury car revving around a jackass is twenty-first-century India in a nutshell. Digital age, meet stone age.

If only I had a camera, he thinks. The men back at the station would love it.

Pardeep's beat is Yamuna Pushta-the largest slum in Delhi, which puts it in the running for the largest slum in the world. In every direction lie blocks of jhuggis, makeshift huts made out of wood and cardboard tied together with string. The shantytown has no electricity or sewers. Today, people are flying kites and playing volleyball; naked children sit grinning as they play in the dirt.

Pardeep brings the van to a stop in front of a three-story concrete housing block beside a particularly fetid section of the Yamuna River. The Yamuna is a tributary of the Ganges. Bathing in its sacred water, according to the holy men, is supposed to free one from the torments of death.

Pardeep rolls up the window and through the dusty glass takes a look out across the smooth brown surface of the polluted cesspool. He sighs and shuts off the engine.

It would free one, all right. But not from death. From life.

He looks up at the grim three-story complex: River Meadow Apartments. They make it sound pleasant, don't they? The calls that have been coming in from the building are confusing. People screaming about a break-in, a crazed killer stalking the hallways.

Pardeep shrugs his narrow shoulders. Looks quiet enough from the outside. Probably a prank.

Still, he lifts his newly issued weapon off the floor of the passenger-side footwell just in case. It's one of the Indian-made INSAS submachine guns that have been handed out in the years since the Mumbai terrorist attacks. He casually shoulders the strap and heads for the building.

In the back of his mind, Pardeep idly hopes it isn't a prank but a real-life terrorist. He would love nothing more than to blow some foreign-born radical scum to smithereens, maybe get promoted out of the city's armpit in the bargain.

He's trying to decide which plum district he would like to be assigned to when an old man runs screaming from the building.

"Raksasom! Rana! Atanka!" he warbles as he runs past the van.

Monsters. Horror. Run.

Monsters. Pardeep smiles to himself, amused. This is a prank. Probably kids playing tricks on some superstitious old fools.

"Hello? Police," he says, entering the lobby. It's deserted. "Police!"